British Educational Research Journal最新文献

The 108 Curriculum Guidelines (108CG) were implemented in high schools in Taiwan in 2019 and have increased the flexibility of curriculum offerings. Schools must now offer diverse curricula, flexible options and self-directed learning courses based on students' needs and teachers' expertise. This study explores how rural high schools in Taiwan promote curriculum leadership following the implementation of the 108CG. Using a case school in southern Taiwan as the study site, it examines the current implementation of the 108CG in rural high schools, the processes and strategies that school members employ in applying curriculum leadership and the challenges they encounter. Six participants from the case school were interviewed, from August 2021 to May 2022. We also conducted observations and document analyses. The results show that the principal and mid-level leaders' collaborative efforts are integral to advancing the 108CG. However, the school faces challenges in implementing the 108CG due to its environmental context. The principal's major challenge stems from the differing curriculum interpretations by tribal chiefs and families in the community. Mid-level leaders also grapple with students' passive learning attitudes and the need for preparedness among teachers for curriculum reform. Although the 108CG have been in operation for more than 4 years, rural high schools continue to face challenges in implementing them. Introducing collaborative lesson planning and using checklists during curriculum review meetings could help track curriculum progress.

This paper sets out to develop understanding around supporting the journeys of care-experienced young people towards higher education (HE) in South-East England, through the professionals working with them. Those with care experience remain less likely than others to enter HE. In contrast to individualised approaches that implicitly or explicitly assume a deficit in care-experienced young people to be ‘filled’ by approaches focusing on increasing their resilience and aspiration, we focus here on the role of professionals who work with them. Findings discussed here come from a set of interviews with seven foster carers and three social workers, carried out as part of a wider project involving an interprofessional team encompassing education, social work and widening participation. We identify that while professionals are often motivated to support care-experienced young people in progressing to HE, many lack the necessary skills and knowledge. This leads us to identify the need for more targeted support both from and for professionals, for young people and those who work with them, to be able to imagine and create HE futures. This requires wider understanding around the impact of trauma on young people's ability to engage with education opportunities, and the need for recognition of the potential of care-experienced young people and differential targeting of resources, drawing on insights from Sen's capabilities approach.

Ever since the 1970s, politicised debates have raged over the teaching of history, dubbed the ‘history wars’. These debates continue to impact primary and secondary teachers' choices of history curriculum foci to this day. This research aimed to discover history teachers' understanding of how to develop diversity within their history curricula and to discuss the possible pitfalls of their decision making. We set out to answer the following questions: (1) How do history teachers and subject leads understand the concept of diversification within the history curriculum? (2) How are schools approaching the diversification of their history curriculum? We carried out this project collaboratively with 10 history teachers and subject leads from four primary and three secondary schools in Kent, South-East England. As a result, we have developed a model of ‘school diversification’ and make several recommendations to support the development and teaching of increasingly diverse history lessons, within the confines of the current National Curriculum. This project adds to the literature by privileging the voice of teachers within classrooms and including collaboration between teachers of all phases within history education in English schools to support the development of diversity within their practice.

This research project explores the use of ‘happy accidents’ as agents for facilitating more meaningful and critical exploration in secondary school art. Owing to a preoccupation with standardisation and quantifiable results, the more nebulous and invisible qualities of art have become deprioritised within many curricula. This paradigm creates ‘safe’ pedagogies that place emphasis on verisimilitude and technical acme as the yardstick for ‘successful’ artwork, preserving the identity of teachers within the epistemological frameworks that dictate education. Equally, as competitive individualism and reward demarcate education, young people are spending more time partaking in activities for their instrumental value. This ‘teaching-to-test’ model translates to formalist, linear modes of making as the most expedient means of achieving grades. The following research aimed to trouble this status quo and offers a pedagogy that allows for more responsive, playful and personal approaches to experimental artmaking. The mechanism used as a springboard into inquiry was the ‘happy accident’, facilitated by the use of unpredictable media such as Photoshop and photocopying. Adopting a middle ground between Atkinson's ‘unknown’ and the inferentialist model described by Walton, students had the latitude to combine known and unknown knowledge to push their artmaking into more meaningful territory, whilst preserving evidence of the ‘mark scheme’. To bolster my attempts at disrupting canonised imagery of ‘good’ school art, students also troubled the common practice of creating overly embellished, illustrative sketchbooks, with the creation of self-made, A2, portfolio style books. The knowledge produced in this project was interrogated within a multimodal, arts-based research methodology: through interview analysis and the analysis of the artwork, or artefacts, produced.

Peggy McIntosh's (White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies, Working Paper 189, Wellesley Center for Research on Women, 1988) list of 50 racial privileges, which purportedly benefit persons of white skin colour, has had enormous impact on social science research and educational curriculum and pedagogy. Surprisingly, to date, no attempt has been made to empirically explore the validity and reliability of her list of racial privileges. To address this issue, we conducted a psychometric analysis on McIntosh's list of racial privileges with 204 adult Australian university students. Using a combination of factor analyses and Rasch modelling on McIntosh's list of racial privileges we identified a 27-item multidimensional scale consisting of three well-functioning and reliable subscales (i.e. a 15-item Racial Representation, a six-item Social Interaction and a six-item Culture and Politics subscale). Moreover, the derived multi-dimensional white privilege instrument was found to have good criterion validity in that persons’ experiences of racism significantly predicted white privilege (i.e. the more racism experienced the less white privilege experienced and vice versa). Finally, analysis of variance comparisons indicated that persons with white skin colour had significantly more white privilege than persons with black skin colour and Asians, while Asians had more white privilege than persons with black skin colour. Overall, this study presents evidence of a psychometrically valid and reliable 27-item multi-dimensional white privilege instrument and lends empirical support to the theoretical underpinnings of McIntosh's contentions.

The COVID pandemic temporarily altered the functioning of all sections of society. In England, it led to major disruption in the teacher education sector leading to curtailed training in schools and a rapid shift to alternative approaches to teaching and learning. By the 2021–2022 academic year, it was hoped that activity would return to a level of normalcy. However, the continued hangover of the pandemic together with the return of high-stakes inspections by Ofsted, and a decision by the UK Government to instigate an accreditation process for all English initial teacher education (pre-service teacher education) programmes, required to allow institutions to continue offering initial teacher education beyond 2024, all combined to create the potential for a very difficult year. We surveyed 159 teacher educators to capture reflections of their experiences form the 2021–2022 academic year, understanding their perceptions through the lens of the Job Demands-Resources Model (Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512, 10.1037//0021-9010.86.3.499) which identifies those factors which may lead to stress and burnout in the work environment (demands) and those which balance against this and offer emotional well-being (resources). The results show a number of high demands over the course of the year, especially related to accreditation and Ofsted pressures, and the extra demands made by the overhang of the pandemic, all factors leading to increased workload. Counteracting these demands are the resources present, particularly the support between colleagues and a strong commitment and enjoyment gained form working with student teachers. However, the long-term sustainability of the role of teacher educator is in question.

Research consistently shows that parents' educational attainment is associated with their children's level of political interest. The life stage when this relationship is established and grows has been identified to be between the ages of 10 and 16. This paper identifies the social class-based practices that drive the influence of parental education on the development of political interest among early adolescents and explains why the social gap grows at this point. The paper draws on two panel surveys, the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study and the Understanding Society Youth Survey, and applies latent growth curve modelling and path analysis. The findings show that university-educated parents influence the change in political interest of their children in early adolescence by raising their educational aspirations, enabling their access to political activities in school, choosing the school for their children, taking their children to museums and art galleries and influencing their children's friendship groups.

Changes to the Welsh curriculum are becoming apparent. The Williams Report culminated in recommendations for schools and initial teacher education (ITE) on the inclusion and teaching of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic histories in Wales. The subsequent Welsh Government ITE action plan was designed to ensure the pro-active recruitment of trainee teachers from Black and racially minoritised backgrounds in Wales. As a result of this legislation, a team of ITE lecturers in a school of education in a Welsh university formed a research triad and larger research collective, the idea being that we needed to decolonise our own pedagogy and curriculum delivery and re-imagine ITE within an anti-racist paradigm. It was key to reflect on our ITE provision, ensuring that our curriculum delivery reflected the ambition of the new Curriculum for Wales,* which encourages practitioners to think differently on what they teach, how they teach and what they want young people to learn. Using a patchwork methodology—which included ‘deep thinking and deep listening’—we examined our current ITE delivery and work that has been done thus far and looked at the gains and areas for development. It became clear that staff within our ‘ITE research collective’ were becoming more knowledgeable and confident in working within a racial dynamic, and consequently felt more able to impart knowledge when engaging with other ITE colleagues and students. This paper charts our ongoing journey and makes recommendations gained from our experiences.

This study contributes to the research on ethnic educational inequality, by deepening the current understanding of education initiatives organised by the ethnic-cultural minoritised communities most affected by these inequalities. A univariate analysis was performed on data from an original survey conducted in Flanders, in which 816 teachers and 3037 pupils from 60 primary schools were asked about, among other things, their experience with and their perceptions of these educational initiatives. The results of this analysis show that these community-based education initiatives are widely attended by ethnic minority youth, but also that teachers in mainstream schools are rarely informed or even aware of the existence of these initiatives, or the important role they play in their pupils' lives. The broader social and scientific implications are discussed in this paper, as little to no similar larger-scale research exists that maps the relationship between these community-based education initiatives and mainstream educational institutions.